Don't Even Think About It (31 page)

This is because our willingness to make a personal sacrifice is entirely bound up with our sense of social identity. If we feel an affinity with the group, then we will willingly make a contribution to prove our loyalty. In times of conflict, we may even sacrifice our life. But this strengthened sense of in-group identity, and our socially wired sense of fairness, makes us deeply resentful of moral rules laid down by outsiders that they themselves do not appear to follow.

Nor do small changes in lifestyle necessarily lead onto the virtuous escalator to larger commitments. Further research has found that even those people who accepted the threat of climate change were all too ready to adopt a single simple action as a token of their concern and then go no further. Columbia University psychologist Elke Weber has identified numerous examples from farming, health, and politics in which people respond to a problem with what she calls “single action bias.” She argues that this may be another bias derived from our evolutionary past when threats were simpler and a single short-term action could safely relieve us from danger and the anxiety of worry.

People then use that single act as a personal justification—what psychologists call moral license—to offset further damaging behavior, just as people order a supersize Diet Coke as an antidote to their double bacon cheeseburger. So, research has found repeatedly, people who buy energy-efficient lights and appliances tend to use them more. People who insulate their houses then turn up the thermostat.

They transfer the moral license to other areas too. When residents in a Boston apartment building were sent notes (with pretty leaf graphics) asking them to save water to “help preserve the environment,” they used 7 percent less water. And they then used 6 percent more electricity.

Researchers at the University of Toronto found that this moral licensing effect was so powerful that people who had just bought environmentally friendly products in an experiment became markedly more willing to take up an opportunity to cheat the university and even steal money.

Within the issue of climate change, people use moral licensing as part of a deliberate process to write narratives that diminish their own responsibility. In interviews, people exaggerate their own small actions and portray them in heroic terms. One participant in a British focus group boasted that he recycled everything he could and that not one piece of paper went into his garbage. This, he added, “makes me feel less guilty about flying as much as I do.”

So, once again, climate change has become wickedly defined by its solutions. For people who accept that climate change just might be a major threat, providing solutions based on small lifestyle changes makes it seem far less dangerous and carbon comes to seem like another form of litter that they really shouldn’t drop.

For people who doubt that climate change exists, demands to change their lifestyle confirm their suspicion that the real threat comes from the environmental liberals who want to control their lives.

What is missing, and what is urgently required, is a coherent policy framework that provides a contract for shared participation—whether through voluntary measures or, as many campaigners now demand, some form of tax, ration, or dividend—within which personal actions are recognized and rewarded alongside equally important contributions from government, business, and fossil fuel companies. Not the power of one, but the power of all.

37

Degrees of Separation

How Climate Experts Cope with What They Know

Sitting on a panel at
the 2012 annual assembly of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, I remember vividly the palpable unease that entered the room when the discussion turned to four degrees. There was a hesitation in broaching the subject. Voices became quieter and less confident. Nonetheless, everyone in the room talked about four degrees Celsius of warming as being entirely probable if not unavoidable.

At the reception later that evening, the scientists chatted amiably in pairs and small groups, clutching their glasses of warm white wine and balancing plates of canapés. With their slightly rumpled old-fashioned clothes and their polite, intense demeanor, they looked like any other group of highly educated professionals—to my eyes, rather like the audience for a concert of somewhat challenging chamber music.

However, listening to the detail of their conversations reminded me that this gathering was far from ordinary. The people in this room constituted a large part—maybe even the majority—of those in Britain who truly understood why a global temperature increase of two degrees might, just, be manageable, and why one of four degrees would be an utter catastrophe. This, after all, is what they have spent their lives studying. Of all people, they know all too well that the phrase
four degrees
is shorthand for environmental, social, and economic collapse. And, as their models keep telling them, we are heading straight for it and could well reach it within sixty years.
‡

According to Professor Lonnie Thompson, a climatologist at Ohio State University, those in his profession are a stolid group, not given to “theatrical rantings about falling skies.” However, he says, they now feel compelled to speak out about the dangers because “virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.” Extraordinary though this statement is, even more extraordinary is that it appeared in an otherwise sober report in the journal of a respected international science association.

Every year their warnings have become ever clearer and more serious. And, it seems, every year they have become less believed. Returning to the quote with which I started this book, these scientists are, I fear, uncomfortably similar to the handful of people in 1942 who knew what was happening to the Jews of Europe, who carried the weight of that dreadful knowledge but struggled to persuade anyone of the existence of a crime of such immensity.

One scientist told me that he was so disturbed by the latest findings that he wrote to a few close friends—he named some of the world’s most senior scientists—and asked them: the future of humanity depends on this, is there any chance—please any chance—that we could be wrong? They replied immediately, saying that they too constantly worried about this and (contrary to what the skeptics claim) were always open to the possibility of being wrong. However, whenever they went back over the evidence, they could not avoid the uncomfortable conclusion that they had indeed gotten this right. “We are active fatalists,” he told me.

Activists and campaigners also struggle with this sense of anxiety, suffering sleepless nights and panic attacks. Dorian Williams, an anthropology senior at Brandeis University who leads the campus divestment campaign for 350.org, says that she experiences “very serious, very low states of being for hours to days to weeks at a time.” It’s never going to go away, she says, but “you just have to work through it so that you can keep fighting.”

People who deal every day with climate change as a reality provide an important insight into the ways that humanity as a whole will cope with its psychological and moral challenges. Almost all analysis concerns the psychology of people who refuse to accept the science—which, understandably, they resent. But what about the people who are already convinced? They are the advance party and, as climate impacts build, everyone will follow their lead.

Their internal moral dilemmas come to a head as they struggle to square what they know about the impacts of high-carbon lifestyles with the pressure to conform to a society where those lifestyles are not just encouraged but also often required as a mark of social belonging.

I have an informal social research project—life is one long experiment after all—in which I gently coax climate change experts to talk to me about their personal holidays. A senior climate economist at the World Bank admitted that he flew regularly for breaks in South Africa but said that that this was a force for good because the carbon offsets he bought “help set a price in the carbon market.” A national media environment correspondent decided to fly with his family to Sri Lanka because, he said, “I can’t see much hope.” A climate scientist specializing in polar research takes several long haul flights every year for skiing holidays because the “job is so stressful.” The lead climate campaigner for one of the largest U.S. environmental organizations flew so often for her work that she could take regular long-distance holidays using her air miles with an automatic upgrade to business class.

All of them felt uncomfortable discussing their leisure flying, and I have found that there is a norm of silence—a meta-silence even—around this topic. Nonetheless, when prompted, all of them could present complex narratives to justify their own behaviors, often containing a moral license or deferring to the social norm among their fellow middle-class professionals. They all argued that they would gladly stop flying but—and here they drew on their insider understanding of the scale of the problem—a single personal sacrifice is meaningless unless it is supported by wider systemic and social change. Ironically, their own well-informed arguments provide the clearest evidence possible that scientific information, on its own, is unable to counter socially engrained behaviors.

Professor Kevin Anderson, the former director of the Tyndall Centre, is unusual for his reluctance to fly for any reason. His audience at a recent conference in China was astonished and impressed when he told them he had come (and would return) by train. He is convinced that this added to the legitimacy of his science.

Anderson regards it as “incredibly disturbing” that the people who shape climate policy are such profligate fliers. He tells me of a conversation with the director of one of the largest power utilities in Britain, who told him, quite casually, that the following weekend he was flying with his horse to China to go riding. Anderson explodes, “We were both about to give evidence at a government hearing on climate change and he was flying his bloody
horse
to China! . . . And when I challenged him, he looked at me like I was some kind of radical lefty!”

Experts seem to believe, Anderson tells me, that the pearls of wisdom that they’ve rained down from thirty-two thousand feet in a first-class seat are so important that they outweigh their emissions and those of the people like them. They don’t see that the reason we have this problem is precisely because of people like them and, he adds, being more conciliatory, “people like me.”

And, I should also add, people like
me
—because I am an expert flyer too. I fly rarely and I always try to justify each flight. But as that word
justify
reveals, I am also prone to constructing a narrative that can resolve the inner conflict I feel every time I sit on a plane. It is all immensely frustrating because I must admit that I love travel and, in my pre–climate change days, I flew a lot. So I know very well that flying is addictive.

Mark Ellingham, the founder of the Rough Guides travel books, coined the phrase “binge flying,” which he compares with nicotine addiction. Interviews with frequent travelers find them using the same language as other forms of addiction. They talk about the buzz or rush, their loss of inhibitions, finding new meaning in life, and their depression on their return.

Maybe this is why the self-serving narratives we experts mobilize to justify our personal flying are so uncannily similar to those that people raise around addictions: I need to do this, I’m not hurting anyone, everyone else does it, I’ve worked for it, I can stop anytime, other people are far worse.

Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon says that the public needs to remember that the people who work on climate issues may be smart but are still human beings like any others, “driven by varying mixtures of ambition, curiosity, orneriness, self-confidence, and altruism.”

However, climate experts
are
different from other people in one critical aspect: We are the lead communicators of climate change and our own actions will always be monitored as a measure of our trustworthiness. In other areas, inconsistent behavior by decision makers is utterly relevant: the racial prejudice of judges, the tax evasion by politicians, and the sexual behavior of priests are all matters of intense public attention because we know intuitively that an internal conflict may undermine their judgment.

Inevitably we run the risk that we will project our own values, inconsistencies, and silences onto the story we tell. Is it any surprise, given these internal conflicts, that there is so little mention of flying among the list of personal actions promoted by environmental groups and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency? Or, indeed, that international aviation is not included in national emissions calculations or the Kyoto Protocol?

Renee Lertzman, a visiting psychology fellow at Portland State University, argues that it is mistaken to judge these inconsistencies as arrogant or hypocritical or apathetic. They are, she says, best understood as a strategy by which experts defend themselves against their anxiety and the internal dilemmas that cause them pain. “We cannot tolerate our own complicity, so we externalize and project our concern onto others—the airline industry or the failure of government policy to control it,” she tells me.

She recalls a participant in one of her workshops complaining that people who fly “lie” when they say that they care about climate change. No, she stresses, “it is
not
lying—these are intentions that they are struggling to negotiate.” Nor, she says, is there a gap between what they say and what they do. She prefers to see this as a tangle of conflicting needs, or, she suggests, a tapestry.